Waco (miniseries trailer - Paramount Network - 2018)

I haven't been writing much in the way of reviews lately because I haven't seen anything good or bad enough to seem worthy of writing about. Because of the film above, I expanded my cable package pretty dramatically, and as a result, have been watching a lot of junk food cinema - stuff I've seen before and will see again, yet can't help but watch even though of the four Criterions I got for Christmas, I've only watched two. Examples of junk food cinema include Office Party (funny as hell), Vanilla Sky (one of my favorite 90s films, second only to Eyes Wide Shut as my favorite Cruise film), Armageddon, Man on Fire etc - I've written about all these films save for Office Party before, and see no reason to write about them again, although Vanilla Sky - Cameron Crowe's remake of it - deserves much more credit than it's ever received.

If you are going to watch Waco, I would recommend watching Waco: The Rules of Engagement first. It looks as though the film is going to paint a rightfully sympathetic portrait of David Koresh and the Davidians, but there was a time when most Americans thought he was the devil incarnate.

I was not one of them, and as I've written before, the nearly two-month standoff at the Davidians home (or the fiendish "compound" as the media insisted calling it) was the formative political event of my life - I was already distrustful of government and far to the right, but seeing on display the use of paramilitary police and federal agents go to war with a group of people on trumped up weapons charges and fabricated child abuse charges made my blood boil. Taken in concert with what happened to Randy Weaver and his family left nothing but disgust for many Americans - one of them was Tim McVeigh, who blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City as retaliation against the ATF for their crimes. Two wrongs don't make a right, obviously, and I lived less than three miles from the site of the bombing and knew a few people directly affected by it. The federal government will never learn, of course - the charges against Cliven Bundy and his family were dropped "with prejudice" after gross misconduct by federal prosecutors, including not sharing with the defense that, per the Bundy's fears, the government had surrounded his property with concealed snipers (Randy Weaver's wife was murdered by one of these government sniper's - she was in the doorway of their cabin, holding their infant baby, when she was murdered).

Anyway, I'm rambling. The point is that I highly recommend watching WTROE before, or at least after, you watch Waco. The cast is phenomenal and again, it looks like it paints a much more balanced picture of both sides of the conflict than the slander that occurred at the time it happened and for years following. Janet Reno was the Attorney General at the time, and as far as I'm concerned she deserves the fires of hell should it exist for what she oversaw.